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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

No, we're not changing houses, we're changing blog engines! We've been on Blogger for almost a year and a half now and just can't get it to do all the things we want it to, so this week we're moving over to a specialized Wordpress install. Take a sneak peak here: www.foodiesathome.photographyblogsites.com and let us know what you think! This new site will let us run our Home and Garden, photography and food blog in a much more efficient manner (right now the code is pretty much a giant hack). We should be ready to move officially later this week. Take the new site for a spin, check out all the features and let us know what you think! Later today we'll post something sweet!

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

There is just something different about food when you're living in a culturally diverse place like the San Francisco Bay Area, besides seeing squid in between the chicken and the trout in the Safeway freezer. The unique ways in which different cultures approach cooking the same food is pretty exciting for us, because it makes it really difficult to run out of things to do with the same dish. Take chicken for example. Growing up, Eric ate more baked BBQ chicken that you could possibly imagine. With rice and green beans or peas it was a perfect busy-weekday American style staple. Our friends from Asian or Mexican households tell us about their chicken based staples growing that would use the exact same animal and create a completely different meal that was very basic to them but complicated or foreign to us. This is extremely apparent in a diverse city like San Francisco, where Charisse learned first hand the differences between Chinese style whole chicken and American style. In American style whole chicken, the insides are usually cleaned out, put in a small bag and placed inside the cavity (if you shop at expensive stores, otherwise they are just tossed in there). We were living in Downtown San Francsico near the boarder of Downtown, Chinatown and the Little Italy area, so the markets catered to everyone as best they could. Charisse got home early from work, having stopped by out market to pick up a whole chicken for dinner. Upon opening the wrapper she found what looked like the bag stuck in the cavity, so she grabbed it and pulled it out, only to realize as she stared at two lifeless eyes that this was not the bag but rather the whole head from the neck up. She screamed and threw the whole thing up in the air and promptly called Eric, who was working for a Chinese family at the time. After about 10 minutes he had calmed down enough to force words out between the fits of laughter he told the story to his bosses, who simply stared at him and said "isn't that normally how they come?" That being said, Charisse was very careful when opening up the chicken for our dinner the other day. This was a simple roasted chicken, stuffed with goat cheese and a honey glaze on top, which added a little extra crisp to the skin and really worked well with the cheese to keep the bird moist.

Friday, July 1, 2011

So we all know how obsessed with technology Eric can be and how not obsessed Charisse is. The big lesson learned in this living room re-remodel has absolutely been how we both view things differently. When we agreed to remodel the house and make it a "grown up house" we both came up with lists of what we wanted in the living room: Charisse wanted crown, wainscoting around the TV, new paint, some new furniture and lots of new art. Eric wanted surround sound. Of course that means he wants a new receiver a new subwoofer, a new remote and lots of speakers around the room. Between the holes in the walls, holes in the new cabinet and new stuff showing up every other day Charisse was not a happy camper this past week. What did make us both happy was Charisse's swiss chard stuffed garlic bread, something she pulled together for Eric's parents who came over to see our progress. We're both garlic lovers and adore garlic bread so this was a super genius way of adding even more of our garden grown swiss chard into our diet and gave Eric a break from trying to figure out how one painting was different from another or why we would buy something that looks like an eight year old could have done it. After Charisse whacked him she explained that we were getting the art "because it looks nice and you got all your stereo crap".